Contrastive Underdetermination Resolution, with Application to Cryonics Revival and Other Possibilities for Life after Clinical Death By R. Michael Perry, Ph.D.
The “copy problem” has been debated in cryonics for many years: Would “you” survive in a future construct very like you but not containing original material? Here an approach to this problem is offered that starts from the position that the problem is scientifically unresolvable, a condition known as contrastive underdetermination. It is argued that a rational choice between alternatives is still possible, the best being that one should accept the notion of survival through a copy. Some deep implications of this viewpoint are considered, including a possibility of restoring long-deceased individuals to life in a distant future. 1. Introduction Contrastive Underdetermination – when two or more theories or interpretations of things have the same empirical consequences and cannot be distinguished on the basis of observations1 – poses a problem in a field like cryonics, where mortality is confronted and issues of personal survival are important. In cryonics persons are cryopreserved after clinical death in hopes that future technology can revive and restore them to healthy consciousness. To date no one has been revived from cryopreservation, and clinical death in most people’s minds is simply “death,” from which there is no likely reprieve, unless mystical or metempirical beliefs are invoked. Cryonics advocates are more optimistic, resting their hopes in future technology to restore those who, they hope, will not have suffered too much deterioration in the aftermath of their clinical dying and subsequent preservation at low temperature. Still, even among these optimists (I include myself) there is much speculation and uncertainty about how it might happen and what issues might be important. Some issues can be confidently assumed to be important, however, even in our present state of ignorance. We would want to know, in particular, if the “same” person would be revived under various assumptions, such as replacement of some or all of the body parts with similar or similarly functioning components. Or instead, would we only have someone who is similar to the original but still an entirely different (or partially different) individual? Opinions vary, and there is no known empirical method for determining the answer. I think this difficulty, whether a person could survive in a copy under various assumptions, is fundamental, in the sense that future science will never simply “find the answer.” One must choose one’s answer based on
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different criteria than whether one’s choice can be said to “fit the facts,” since more than one, significantly different theory or interpretation of the relevant issues will do that. Here I propose a method of contrastive underdetermination resolution (CUR) which allows a choice between competing viewpoints under a wide variety of conditions. The method endeavors to select, among the empirically equivalent candidates, a theory with “optimal” consequences. We must determine what we mean by “optimal” but at least we have reduced the one philosophical problem to another one, hopefully an easier one to deal with. Once again, there is more than one possible choice of an answer. Some, for example, may want to be as sure as possible that it will be they who are revived and not someone else. On this basis they may elect whole body preservation, accepting the extra cost of the procedure over, say, the neuro option in which only the head with the brain is preserved. Others may feel that there is no metaphysical advantage in being revived as an “original” rather than a copy, and may even make the choice to be revived as a software bot or “uploaded” in a future computational device – supposing this is possible – to escape biological limitations altogether. (The brain should be sufficient for this, so the would-be uploader may be satisfied with head-only or brain-only preservation. Furthermore, assuming a successful upload, the physical remains, including the brain, having now become superfluous, may be discarded or stored indefinitely as a historical relic.) Here I try to give due consideration to the different perspectives on this problem, including the “restrictive” position (RCUR, suggested pronunciation, “are-cure”) that the original body may be needed to preserve the original person, so that one should choose the most complete preservation possible. My sympathies however, are with the “expansive” outlook (ECUR, suggested pronunciation, “e-cure”) that asserts that one survives if no reasonable empirical test can show otherwise. On this basis, then, a copy of you, which would be similar to you in all important psychological respects, is you. More than one, divergent copy would signify that one individual had split into two or more, and (certainly!) not that the one, original person had died. The copy problem is essentially a philosophical problem, rather than a physical or scientific one. Contrastive Underdetermination
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